﻿﻿March 25 ~ Fifth Week﻿﻿

Dear old and new friends,

Agnostics and atheists, non-religious or religious, no one yet has escaped dying! This Haystack reflection is for all to ponder as we anticipate the events of Friday, April 3rd, that remembers the death of Jesus. Believers or doubters, we all need to think about that unavoidable event in life and the reality known to every backyard gardener that the beautiful pictures on the seed packets don’t come alive unless they die. Do garden seeds fear their death as we fear ours?

More than a primal survival instinct our fear of dying is evident from our daily speech when we politely say, “Mary passed away today”—instead of “she died”! So common is this darkest fear of the inescapable that in the stone business a salesperson never speaks of tombstones, instead refers to them as “memorial stones or monuments.” Regardless what you want to call it, to each of us someday the “unspeakable” will come so we best wisely prepare for it by thinking about it seriously.

Surprisingly the best preparation for a happy death is to become an expert lover who never tires of more unselfishly loving—more totally and sacrificially loving—regardless if married or not! Single, divorced, widowed or vowed religious, the wandering teacher of Galilee who died crucified on a cross calls everyone to wisely observe his one and only commandment: “Love God and each other.” Every act of love requires death of self; dying to the self’s powerful demands to be always right, first and in control. The need for the self to die is essential according to theologian Ilia Delio, “A self that is full of itself can never receive the love of another nor make a genuine movement towards the other.” Infallible is this ironclad rule of how to love.

The legend that Adam, by sinning against God, ushered death into this world was the way the ancients tried to explain the existence of this dark horrifying fate of all life. Science has shown us that death and life appear together after evolution’s Big Bang as dying stars exploded outward in space all the raw ingredients of life. These star deaths were repeated over and over in the billions of years of evolution as galaxies appeared, and then our daystar, the sun, was born out of the clouds of various gasses and atomic hydrogen. The other planets in our solar system along with our planet Earth were gradually created from cosmic clouds in like fashion until, most amazingly, we humans became living Easters of long dead stars.

Good Friday is the Great Valentine’s Day! Believers and unbelievers need to see the cross with all its suffering, pain and death not as a sacrifice-payment to redeem humanity from the punishment of its sins but rather as a cosmically gigantic act of love. The cross symbolizes the deeply profound cost of authentic loving and the sign of a willingness to go to extreme limits of genuine true affection and faithfulness. Even if it appeared God had abandoned him in his agonizing death, Jesus never once curses, asks why, or abandons God. The cross then is the ultimate sign of a love that knows no end. There is an old Russian expression that says you can tell the depth of belief of a woman or man by the way they make the sign of the cross.

Dick Sumpter

3/25/2015 02:17:37 am

"I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?" -Jalaluddin Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

cynthia

3/25/2015 07:39:01 am

"When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare Collection)

I have not yet heard anyone state to me that Jesus..."passed away on the cross" ...Jesus always dies. No wonder he is the bright star!

sheralyn

3/26/2015 01:04:56 pm

A historical note .... the above quote from Shakespeare was recited by Robert Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Dan S.

3/29/2015 03:53:58 am

Dear Ed and Friends old and new,

(In my humble opinion) Indeed Christ did not die to save mankind from God’s punishment. How can an all merciful God punish? Jesus did however come to save us from ourselves. “The sign of the Cross” is a sign of unconditional love and obedience to God’s will. The cross is a sign that every act of love includes a death of self. Non-believers think that Christians are barbaric using a death instrument as a symbol of their beliefs, unknowing that the true meaning of endless love behind this sign. They ask how this one man, Jesus, dying can in any way be a saving act, while not seeing the sacrifice for ultimate love’s power over fear and evil. Given as an example we learn that loving to the ultimate is what saves us from our sinfulness and what transitions us from our false self. This should have been the motivation behind our Lenten journey. It was not about “giving up candy or cookies”, but giving up of false self and a transformation from what we should not be to what we are capable of. Lent and Good Friday are not about doom and gloom. Doom and gloom is when we drift away from God. Lent is about daily renewal can getting closer to God in preparation for the grand renewal of Easter. Our daily renewal includes us in the divine romance.

Sin is anything that removes us from the love of God or uses love perversely for love of power, popularity, and possessions. Sin is something all of weak humanity falls into, and is not something that only happens to someone else. We are not here to judge others and to point fault. As Jesus taught us up to and on the cross, we are here to love each other regardless of our common faults. We are here because of an act of Divine Love. We are here to share in that Divine Love with God and neighbor. There should be a universal expression that says, “You can tell the depth of belief of a woman or man by the way they replicate the sign of the cross.”

- A Blessed Holy Week, Dan

Dan

4/3/2015 12:29:02 am

Dear Friends of Ed,

As we reflect on readings of Good Friday, this one brought our dear friend Ed to mind:

"The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them." -Isaiah 50:4

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Edward Hays

Haysian haphazard thoughts on theinvisible and visible mysteries of life.